David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Fórsa is asking that the Minister and the Government, or at least the HSE anyway, would negotiate with Fórsa and other healthcare trade unions on the pay and numbers strategy, which makes sense, have a workforce plan, which makes sense as well, and deal with safe staffing levels.

Another observation I will make is that it is very odd and bizarre that we train so many healthcare professionals and that we have to pay for that training, and rightly so, and yet - and I know there are some exceptions with fourth-year nurses - many graduates are not being offered posts because the posts are simply not there. This is because they are not being funded. They were vacant posts that are now gone. This makes no sense. We are telling those people to go and work in the private sector or emigrate, as opposed to coming to work in the public system. The whole reason we have workforce planning and that we train the healthcare professionals we do is meant to be based on population growth, demographics, demand and all these issues. Yet we do not recruit them and put an embargo in place or we curtail recruitment. I will leave my contribution at that. I support the request from Fórsa in respect of the need to have a proper negotiation concerning the pay and numbers strategy.